Q: So I've been trying to find a word for seer (clairvoyant, fortune teller) and couldn't find one. The closest I've come is combining words for future (vencuyot) and vision (haa'it), however, I believe that something like observer/watcher would fit better the issue is that I can only find the word for observe/watch over (ja'hailir). How would I go about creating a coherent translation for seer using these, or other, words?

1. The sentence is intelligible and correct as far as I can tell. Save two things. First is that the verbs aren't conjugated. To produce the stem you drop the -r at the ends of verbs. Without dropping the -r it comes out as "I to feel". With be'kad you need to add a beten, the little apostrophe, in between the possessive "be" and the noun "kad". Without it you get bekad which theoretically could be a whole different word. Not only does the beten link the possessive to the noun, but it's also a glottal stop. That is the little sound between the "uh" and "oh" in "uh oh". So it is a meaningful little thing. You can also drop cuyir. "To be" is a rarely used form of that verb. The "to exist" meaning seems to be used more. Either way it's more emphatic than necessary. Think of it like people who always use pronouns in Spanish. It's technically not incorrect but it sounds a bit weird. Other weird note is the word of be'kad aaray. Which is correct. But aaray be'kad could also be correct. The word order on some things is freer than English so feel free to play around with that. I prefer be'kad aaray personally just because I think it sounds more poetic.

2. The definitive article, "the", is rarely used. The emphatic "haar" I feel would only be used in exceptional circumstances of importance or respect. It is emphatic after all. By deeming something worth using haar you're hammering home that it's THE thing. That's a big deal. Te I feel would be used similarly but for less extreme situations. Like let's say you have two knives. One is a rusty piece of shit that you keep for some reason but it's not useful. The other actually is useful. You're working on something that requires a knife to cut and ask a friend for the knife. They have the gall to ask which knife. So you grumpily use "te kal" to get across that it's THE knife. You know the one that actually cuts and isn't a rusty hunk of fuckall? Di'kut.

3. Mando'a sentence structure is, by and large, very similar to English. This is one of the reasons that some consider it less a language and more an extended English based code. You can, in theory, take whatever English sentences you want and just swap words in and out. But Mando'a offers a bit more flexibility of word order and how wording works than English. Which basically means that so long as the meaning comes across you can put words in different orders not used in English. In fact you might want to switch word orders to place emphasis on specific things. There's also some cases where Mando'a doesn't require a "little word" like how English might. "Jate'shya" doesn't need to be followed by "than" to carry the meaning of "better than", for example. "Haatyc or'arue jate'shya ori'sol aru'ike nuhaatyc," is translated as "Better one big enemy you can see, than many small enemies you can't see" but more literally it'd come out as "Visible large'enemy better many small enemies unseen". There's no "than" here.

Another example that doesn't translate literally, but does get across the meaning due to wording and emphasis on wording is seen in "Gar taldin ni jaonyc; gar sa buir, ori'wadaas'la.". We translate this as "Nobody cares about your father, only the father you will be". Literally though it's coming out as "Your bloodline is not important. You as a father? Large importance." The words aren't exact but the ones picked are stressing the specific bits that make the meaning of the sentence important and culturally that can be very important. You could literally use buir instead of taldin, but you'd be losing the very important distinction between taldin and aliit in the process. That's moving away from grammar itself though and more into the semantics of idioms. But that sort of thing's rather important to languages I feel, and it's a big reason that non-native speakers of, say, Arabic sound like weird robots to native speakers many times. We don't have too many examples of full sentences in the Mando'a canon as it is, but it is a thing to keep in mind and play with.